This tutorial is designed to provide a quick and easy way to filter your unwanted junk email, often referred to as SPAM (Self Promotional Advertising Message). Similar to junk mail that you find in your residential mailbox, you will probably receive unwanted junk mail in your email box as well. By following the steps below for either Outlook® 2003 , Outlook® 2000, or Outlook Express®, you will be able to redirect unwanted emails from your “inbox” to a “SPAM” directory for later review or deletion.
Don’t have Outlook? Download the latest Internet Explorer which is bundled with Outlook Express for FREE by following this link.
NEW FEATURES
Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 has many new features to block junk e-mail (spam). The most notable feature is Microsoft’s Junk E-Mail Filter with Microsoft SmartScreen Technology. SmartScreen Technology is based on a machine-learning Bayesian technology that uses a probability-based algorithms to determine whether email is legitimate or spam. To educate the SmartScreen “filter”, more than 100,000 Hotmail spam fighters submitted or classified their actual e-mail as either spam or good e-mail and sent that e-mail to Microsoft to be processed. The bottom line - Microsoft had LOTS of email to tweek their new technology against spam. In my personal experience, the filter does a pretty good job at screening out spam with very few false positives.
There exist 5 key features in Outlook® 2003 to help you combat spam:
- Junk E-Mail Filter
- Safe Senders List
- Safe Recipients Lists
- Blocked Senders List
- AutoUpdate
JUNK E-MAIL FILTER
In previous versions of Outlook it was up to the end user to create his/her own spam filter. In fact, the Outlook® 2000 and Outlook Express® tutorials show you step by step how to do this. However, Outlook® 2003 has a predefined spam filter.
- The following procedures were tested with Outlook 2003 which is bundled with the Office 2003 software suite. You can determine your version by opening Outlook and clicking on Help > About Microsoft Office Outlook.
- Open Outlook by double-clicking on the Outlook icon located on your desktop.
- Click on Tools > Options.
- Click on the Junk E-mail… button.
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The first “Options” tab is where you control the junk filter.
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No Automatic Filtering essentially turns off the junk e-mail filter.
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Low will only filter junk e-mail if it scores a high spam confidence level (SCL) rating.
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High will filter junk e-mail if it scores a medium SCL rating. The lower the rating, the less likely the e-mail is spam.
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Safe Lists Only turns off the junk e-mail filter and will only allow e-mail to be delivered to your inbox if the sender or the recipient is listed in the “Safe Senders” and “Safe Recipients” lists. You might use this option if you have the attitude “If I don’t know the sender of the e-mail, it’s spam”. This may be ok for personal e-mail but this is definitely not an option for businesses attracting new customers.
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The last option allows you to “Permanently delete” junk e-mail. If, after you have been using the junk e-mail filter for some time, you notice that the filter has never filtered one of your legitimate e-mails into the Junk E-mail folder, then you might consider simply deleting the filtered spam e-mail rather than keeping a copy for your review.
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Outlook® 2000 and Outlook Express® coming soon please be patient - Write a comment below if you are desperate for them 
